BookBlast® Podcast

A surreal, subversive, richly allegorical work that explores political anxiety, complacency and desire through a magical realist lens, Owlish was widely praised by critics in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. Professor Q falls in love with a music-box ballerina Aliss, as she mysteriously comes to life. Encouraged by his strange friend Owlish, Q is swept into an obsessive, fanta...

What inspires a reader to choose one book and not another? Do readers' groups stick to safe books only? Are marketing segmentation and persona-creation such a good idea? To what extent, in reality, are readers influenced by celebrity book clubs? In this episode of the BookBlast® Podcast, we explore the comfort zones of modern reading culture and the value of reading experience over academic value...

Book Club Lovers of Franz K. Burhan Sönmez with Kirsty Gunn, novelist Lovers of Franz K. by Burhan Sönmez appears to be focused on the fate of Ferdy Kaplan who is arrested in 1968 West Berlin for killing a twenty-year-old student at a bus stop, and seriously injuring an elderly man who turns out to be Max Brod, literary executor of Franz Kafka. Kommissar Müller’s interrogation of Kaplan about his...

The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek, beautifully translated by Nick Caistor, out with Open Borders Press, is based on the forgotten conflict between Finland and the Soviet Union known as the Winter War. Norek draws on genuine battles and hardships which he researched in person by spending time on the ground, visiting the sites of key battles to get a very real feel of the distances, the extreme i...

Byron and the Beauty: A Turkish Tale by Muharem Bazdulj, translated by John Cox (2016), is an atmospheric, fictional reimagining of Lord Byron’s 1809 travels through the Balkans. Set over two weeks in October, the novel blends history, romance, and myth as Byron becomes captivated by the elusive Zulejha whom he barely encounters, yet he becomes obsessed. The lyricism and evocative atmosphere of th...

Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker and read on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix is a stark, tragic, beautifully written novel which confronts the moral bankruptcy and paralysis of Western humanism and liberalism in the face of one of the humanitarian crises of our time. Set against the backdrop of desperate migrants attempting to cross the English Channel f...

Anton Chekhov’s short stories are staples of English literature degrees and creative writing courses alike, yet his earliest stories written between the ages of twenty and twenty-two are often overlooked. This volume of Chekov’s Earliest Stories: Stories, Novellas, Humoresques, 1880–1882, edited by Rosamund Bartlett and Elena Michajlowska, provides the first comprehensive English translation of th...

“He wanted to forget not only what he’d done, but above all the person he was when he did it and the reasons he’d become so corrupt.” A man on the run breaks into an unoccupied flat in an isolated, half-abandoned Spanish housing development, left unfinished after the 2008 crash, where a small group of neighbours struggles to live normally. What happens when a man in hiding collides with a communit...

The BookBlast® Translation Book Club meets in person on the second Monday of each month, hosted by Georgia de Chamberet, at Hatchards, Piccadilly, to discuss works of fiction in English translation published in the last ten years. Hear special guest at our December translation book club, Frank Wynne, translator of The National Telepathy by Roque Larraquy (Charco Press, 2025). A heavyweight transla...

Elena Knows, Claudia Piñeiro translated by Frances Riddle, out with Charco Press, discussed at the BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Hatchards, Piccadilly, London, in person with the author and her publisher. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022.  Elena Knows explores themes of illness, the influence of the Catholic Church, the mother-daughter relationship, and the oppressive soc...

Fathers and Fugitives by S. J. Naude translated by Michiel Heyns, out with Europa Editions, discussed at the BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Hatchards, Piccadilly, London.  Fathers and Fugitives follows Daniel, a gay journalist in London, who becomes involved with a Serbian couple after meeting them at the Tate Modern. What begins as a casual, sexually charged relationship evolves into a one-sid...

Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Lucy North, published by Pushkin Press discussed at the BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Hatchards, Piccadilly, London.  Record of a Night Too Brief is a collection of three surreal novellas imbued with a particular kind of magical realism that veer at times into the absurd, creating a tapestry of strange poetic imagery, episodes of bi...

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare translated by John Hodgson discussed at the BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Hatchards, Piccadilly Ismail Kadare, the renowned Albanian novelist and poet, navigated the oppressive environment of communist Albania under dictator Enver Hoxha. This unusual book is based around Stalin’s alleged three-minute telephone call to Boris Pasternak. The discussion examined t...

Clara Reads Proust by Stephane Carlier translated by Polly Mackintosh discussed at the BookBlast Translation Book Club, Hatchards, Piccadilly. Set in part in a hairdresser's salon in regional France this engaging novel about how Proust changes Clara's life answers many questions including: Why read Proust?; how can a book change your life?; the beauty of Proust's descriptions; Proust and Ernaux as...

The BookBlast® Translation Book Club meets in person on the second Monday of each month, hosted by Georgia de Chamberet, at Hatchards, Piccadilly, to discuss works of fiction in translation published in the last ten years. Georgia and Hatchards’ booksellers, choose well-written, engaging storytelling to inspire reading for pleasure as well as illuminating cultures from around the world. Hear our s...

Pour célébrer la parution du livre 'Une femme, deux hommes Lesley Blanch, Théodore Kommissarzhevsky et Romain Gary' à la Maison de Balzac, Paris, le Mercredi 5 Juin 2024, Simon Bentolila de Lire Magazine a discuté avec Georgia de Chamberet, de la vie et des amours de Lesley Blanch (1904-2007). Femme libre et autonome, artiste complète et grande voyageuse, elle n’en était pas moins totalement dévou...

Georgia de Chamberet at BookBlast® is delighted to interview Sian Williams, the visionary founder of the Children’s Bookshow. Discover how this much loved and hugely popular national tour of writers and illustrators of children’s literature first began and who will be on tour this autumn. Michael Rosen: “The Children’s Bookshow takes children’s authors to meet tens of thousands of children, introd...

Prize-winning essayist, novelist, poet and academic, Abdourahman Waberi in conversation with Georgia de Chamberet about the events and cultures that have inspired him. Born in 1965 in Djibouti, he left his homeland for France in 1985 where he studied English at the University of Caen. He did a degree in English at the University of Dijon where he wrote a thesis on the work of the Somali novelist,...

An autobiographical first novel, The Last One tells the story of Fatima and her family. The confusing polarities between different worlds and cultures that are portrayed sparked an intense Media debate in France. Although based on true events and experiences, Fatima Daas changed certain aspects in order to be free to write what she wanted, and convey her feelings about specific events.   Tune in t...

Faïza Guène writes about normal people living in urban tower block estates surrounding cities like Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. Her first novel, Kiffe kiffe demain, published in England under the title Just Like Tomorrow, sold over 400,000 copies when it came out and has been translated into 26 different languages. She was just nineteen. Tune in to hear her lively conversation with translator of si...

Vanessa Springora’s memoir, Consent, became an instant, international literary sensation when it was published in France in January 2020. Her beautifully written, intimate and powerful description of her relationship in the mid-1980s with the French author Gabriel Matzneff, when she was fourteen and he fifty, is a beautifully written universal #MeToo story of power, manipulation, trauma, resilienc...

As a reminder of what entertaining, inoffensive satire constitutes, pick up a copy of Bestseller by Georgian trailblazer, Beka Adamashvili, deftly translated by Tamar Japaridze, published by Dedalus Books. A blogger, screenwriter and creative director at an advertising company, Adamashvili’s mischievous sense of humor and deep knowledge of world literature, combined with marketing nous, sharpen hi...

"In The Fig Tree, deftly translated by Olivia Hellewell, Goran Vojnović portrays three generations of a family whose lives are marked by the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its brutal aftermath. It is a remarkable portrait of a country’s fragmentation and a family’s fracture." Lucy Popescu, The BookBlast Diary Presented by Georgia de Chamberet | Produced by Rupert Such

In THE WHITE DRESS, Nathalie Léger tells the story of Pippa Bacca, a thirty-three-year-old Italian feminist performance artist who decided to hitchhike from Milan to Jerusalem wearing a white wedding dress to symbolise “marriage between different peoples and nations.” Through her intense examination of Bacca’s final work and of the often polarised public reaction to the role of women in art, Léger...

Georgia de Chamberet interviews Philip Gwyn Jones who has extensive experience at the heart of literary publishing having started his career at the late, lamented Flamingo imprint at HarperCollins, then founding Portobello Books and merging it with Granta Books, moving on to Scribe, and since June this year, heading up the Picador imprint at Macmillan. “You were the first British editor to offer a...